Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - ALMA Adventure

Episode Date: March 18, 2013

The first of two shows about Mat Kaplan's journey to Chile's Atacama Desert for the inauguration of the Atacama Large Millimeter small millimter Array, the most ambitious, Earth-based astronomy project in history.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My Chilean Alma Adventure, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier, and this time to the driest spot on Earth. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. I'm back from Chile's Atacama Desert with a great story to tell. I'll begin the telling here and continue it next week. You'll hear from many people who have dedicated years or decades to the creation of ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Submillimeter Array, our planet's most ambitious and highest astronomy instrument.

We'll check in with Bruce Betts, too, and Bill Nye is up right now. Emily Lactual is at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas. We'll talk with her next week. Bill, it's good to be back, good to be talking with you. And I guess while I was in Chile, the fight to save planetary science continued? Yes, yes, yes. the fight to save planetary science continued? Yes, yes, yes.

Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's political analyst and I, went to Congressman Adam Schiff's office in Burbank, California, and we talked the talk about what the next move is and this and that. And so everybody wants to restore the funding for planetary science, but no one's done it yet. So we'll see what happens. Apparently, the Office of Management and Budget, the gossip and gab that we've received, needs a nudge. They need to be reminded how important planetary science is. Matt, in the meantime, while you were flying around there with your amazing deep space telescopes, this guy, Dennis Tito,

Deep Space Telescopes. This guy, Dennis Tito, wants to send a couple to Mars and back. I heard about this. For $2 billion US. Now, the Apollo program, which included many missions to the moon, six landings and other flybys and an unsuccessful Apollo 13 and so on, that was $151 billion. Now, if you've cut the cost by a factor of 10, it's still $15 billion. Have you cut it by a factor of 100? I'm open-minded but skeptical. Anyone who wants to send a couple, a married couple. And there was a joke, which I think is fabulous.

These two people returned from Mars. This is in the future, 2018. I guess they return in 2021. And they're both dead. And they've both been dismembered, torn apart. And the forensic question is, how could this possibly happen? How could you survive the tearing off of limbs and the other? One of them should have been the last person standing. And then someone else in the room remarks, well, you've obviously never been married. It's hilarious. Two people in zero gravity for two years. I can see some trouble. Matt, if the guy succeeds, if these people get up there, even if they're off by a factor of 10, whatever, it will change the world.

Everybody will be in a hurry to go to Mars if they pull it off. Pull it off, so to speak. Thank you, Bill. Sorry. Onward we carry. Thank you, Bill. Sorry. Onward we carry. Thank you, Matt. He's Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. He'll be back again with more next week. I'll be right

back with the beginning of my visit to the Atacama Desert and the Alma Observatory. I knew I was headed for a great adventure, but I barely suspected how truly magnificent visiting the Alma Observatory would be, or what a great group of traveling companions I'd have. I'll try to capture the flavor of the trip through this week's and next week's episodes of the show, but I can't possibly do it justice. I hope you'll check out the images and enjoy the video I also captured in Chile, and that you'll listen to the extended conversations with many of the wonderful people I spent time with.

Everything will be on the show page that you can reach from planetary.org slash radio. We'll begin on the morning of March 12. Thank you. a mere 2,900 meters, or 10,000 feet above sea level. That's where I found one of the two ALMA team members I first met last January at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society. I missed the last official tour of the control room, but thanks to Allison Peck, that's where we're standing right now at the OSF. And this is where almost everything is controlled? That's right, yes. So this control room controls not only the antennas that are at the high site at 5,000 meters, so we control those remotely, so fortunately we don't have to go up to 5,000 meters to do that.

But also we have a lot of testing stations here in the same control room. So we spend a lot of time testing the antennas at this elevation before we send them up to 5,000 meters. And obviously this is advantageous because you don't want to have to work send them up to 5,000 meters. And obviously this is advantageous because you don't want to have to work on an antenna at 5,000 meters. You'd much rather get the testing done here at 3,000 meters. We have three workstations, all of which have cameras pointed at the antennas so we can see what the antennas are actually doing. And they all run the same software to allow us to do things like to check the pointing, to check that the drives are working properly, to check that the surface accuracy is what it should be.

So that all takes place in this room. And so at night, you can have up to 20 people in here, maybe six astronomers, telescope operators, engineers. It's really the heart of the telescope. I wonder if there's ever been a day like this here. I mean, it really has been a big party for science. This is enormous. I mean, this is so exciting for everyone who's been involved with the project because we have a lot of VIPs, we have a lot of press who we can finally say, you know, this is

what we've been doing, this is what scientists will be able to do, these are the capabilities of the telescope. And so we can get all that information out there. And so it's a very exciting time, particularly for the people who have been working so hard for so long. And some people have been working 30 years, like Al, who we spoke to a while ago. And there are also people who moved to Chile specifically just to commission the telescope. And they've been down here for as much as five years, working day in, day out, to get the telescope working as well as it does now.

Well, and you spent an awful lot of time not just here but in Santiago. That's right. So I was in Santiago, living in Santiago for five years. And during that period, I actually came up here to the telescope every other week. And of course, we have to fly. It's quite a distance. And so it turns into a fairly hectic schedule, but it's really the only way to make sure that what you're doing on the telescope is working as well as you think it is. You actually have to be in the control room and look at the data coming in. So it was entirely worth it.

Can you imagine having another experience like the one you've had with this facility? I enjoyed it enormously. I think that future telescopes will probably be slightly different insofar as telescopes like the SKA, for instance, won't be quite as stringent about the hardware requirements, but the software is going to be much, much, much more complicated. And so I think the commissioning process will be a little bit different. So I don't think that there will be actually an opportunity like this ever again. We're appealing to any astronomer anywhere who is thinking about something in the sky,

who's thinking about the evolution of galaxies, stars, whatever. And they can use ALMA to contribute to the data that they already have. You still love coming down here? I really do. I really do. When I first left, I was very tired, and I was looking forward to a break. And now it's been a few months, and coming back to visit and seeing everybody who's still working their heart out on the project and seeing how much good science it's doing, it's just fantastic for me. I love it. Our group got back on the bus for the ride up to the Array Operations Site, or AOS, 5,000 meters or 16,500 feet up.

Before we left, we were briefly visited on the bus by the other person I'd met in January. Al Wooten is given credit by many as the first to envision an observatory like Alma. He started work on that dream 30 long years ago. Do you have to pinch yourself to... No, absolutely. Yeah, right. I don't know whether I said this, but I came up here earlier. I love coming up here to work with the operators and the astronomers to run that thing

because it's just such a thrill. that thing because it's just such a thrill. We've heard several times that what Alma will be capable of doing initially won't even compare to what it will be able to do down the line with better receivers and so on. Gosh, that was my homework. You know, we have a time capsule that's going to be open 40 years from now. I think it's part of the ceremony tomorrow, perhaps. to be open 40 years from now. I think it's part of the ceremony tomorrow, perhaps. And I was asked to think of what we would be doing in 40 years that would be hard to dream of. And I'm sorry I never finished that homework assignment. Moments later, our bus began the long climb to the AOS. Gianni Marconi took the seat next to me. He's a transplanted Italian astronomer who serves as one of the lead

commissioning scientists for ALMA, making sure each element of the great instrument performs as expected. Gianni worked for Alison Peck before she returned to the U.S., and he has spent many hours at the high site. So what didn't occur to me until we started to speak is that, you know, there are still new dishes arriving at the high site, getting there, I think, 57 in operation now. But each time one is added, that's quite an additional complication for the handling of the signals and for the correlator, the supercomputer. Yeah, every time that you add one element, you have to combine this element with all the other elements in the array, all the other antennas. It means if you have 40 antennas, you have 40 combinations with the new elements. So this is a lot, huge

amount of computation needs that the correlators should deal with. It is not perfect at the moment, it is not perfect like any other young experiment. It is the most powerful that we have on this planet. So it's working better than the other one at the moment, no matter what. In the future, it will be a fantastic machine. Once that's fixed, it will be exactly within the specs of this project I think that will last several years before we have another machine like ALMA.

We've heard this from a number of the other scientists and engineers, that it's saying sort of, just wait till you see what this can do. Yeah, yeah. This machine can do, on the paper, it's fantastic what this machine can do. But also, the very beginning of the early science that we are doing now is already producing scientific results of really, really important relevance in the world. When we return, you'll join Gianni Marconi and me as we walk among the giant radio telescopes high atop the Atacama Desert.

This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from, and are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do, and together we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society.

We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan with the first of two shows about my just completed visit to the Atacama Large Millimeter Submillimeter Array in Chile. Our bus from the much lower OSF finally

reached the magnificently barren plain where giant radio telescopes have begun to work as one, connected by fiber optic lines to the world's second highest building and the highest supercomputer on the planet, known as the Correlator. It was cold and windy, though the weather was not nearly as extreme as it can often become. I was glad to have my heavy jacket and my pressurized can of oxygen. Commissioning scientist Gianni Marconi kept his O2 in his pocket. So here we are in the center, the core of the world's most powerful astronomical observatory. Yes, we are in the center of the Halma Ray, essentially in the center of the central array

of Halma, where at the moment we have only 57 antennae. Of the 66 there are the complete project. Only 57? Only 57, nine antenna to go. And moments ago, they did their dance for us. So moments ago, we see 57 antenna move all together with silently, to not disturb this place that is an only place for the native here. It is an amazing thing to see this much metal all moving like synchronized dancers.

Yes, synchronized dancers. Each of these antennas is 120 tons and is moving silently like nothing. A door in our house is much more noisy than this antenna probably. Now this movement was just for our benefit. Of course this movement was for the press. The antenna are moving now but the antenna can move in this way also during the observation of course to point a target on sky and then they have to track this target for the rest of the night. They don't move at this speed normally. I see one of the pads right over here. We can walk over this way. This is one of the pads where the antenna can move normally because the antenna, now you

can see one of the possible configuration of the array, but for scientific need you can move the antenna all around up to an area of 16 kilometers in diameter. So this is a major operation though, to pick up one of these and bring it over here. Yes, to move one of these antennas takes a few hours to move the antenna and other one day to reconfigure the antenna to check if the antenna is connected and is working properly for the science. So once it gets here they secure it I can see these these big I don't know what you call them. We have three pads essentially, these three cylinders where the antenna is positioned with the accuracy of a few microns. This is the accuracy of the position of the

antenna. And then there are just three big screws that keep the antenna in place. Now where do they plug in? Inside this, how do you say this? A plate? A plate here. Below this plate, you have all the cable, the fiber, the power, and the connection with the central computer that you spoke before. Okay, so they just pull the cable out of here, and there's a connector on... There are connectors inside the antenna. You plug in, and then you check it, if the connection is correct or not. I met one of the engineers who, in fact, the engineer who is in charge of the front ends,

and they talked about the trucks that go up to service the front ends. Have you seen this? Yes, there is the front end service vehicle. It's similar to one of these service vehicles that you can see in the airport, the catering vehicle that's used in the airport, with the difference that instead of putting food

inside the antenna, it's putting the front end, it is the core, the heart of this antenna. The front end is the collection of receiver that receive the signal from the universe. So when would astronomers have to come up here? Is that rare? No, the astronomers normally they don't have to come up here because they operate the system from 3,000 meters, the control room down there. And only the engineers are coming up here to fix the antenna, to do the maintenance, to check the antenna. In a special occasion like this one, the astronomers are just coming up here to show for fun the antenna to the people.

These dishes are not all the same. They are different sizes and even different construction. Yes, we have two kinds of sizes, 12-meter antenna and 7-meter antenna. The 7-meter antenna, the one that are located in the very core of the array that is connected to the correlator of the Japanese, and around this one you have four 12 meter antenna built by Japanese also and the

rest of the array is done by a 12 meter antenna built in North America that are vertex and 12 meter array built by a consortium in Europe that are high end. Do you enjoy coming up here? Well it's fantastic I like I like the Altipl, the Chilean Altiplano. So I like the mountain. For me, this is a fantastic place and the view is amazing. It's wonderful. I would stay, but I'm afraid I'd have to keep sucking on my oxygen. A lot of oxygen, it's fine. But you're in good shape. I'm trained. I'm well trained to stay up here. So I'm an astronomer. I'm well trained to say up here. I'm an astronomer, but I'm doing something else, not only astronomy. Very true. It was thrilling and even intoxicating, though some of that may have been the lack of air.

Even more thrilled were two of my journalist colleagues. Nicole Gulucci is a radio astronomer and social media maven known online as the Noisy Astronomer. She works for CosmoQuest. Tanya Burchill blogs and tweets as Radio Astro Gal. She is the media producer and science writer for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the U.S., our host for this ALMA journey. Both had warned me that our conversation would end

the moment the big dishes began to move again. Radio astronomers in paradise? Oh my God, yes! This is fantasy land. This is absolutely fantastic. Of course they've got gates around them so I can't run up and hug them. Which is unfortunate because I've totally hugged a radio telescope before. Yeah, I have a list.

Yes. Tanya, you've been here before. Yes. I was here when there were only about seven antennas in the array. And so they were just the 12 meters. There were no European antennas at all all and so now this is a completely different array this is you know not the array from two years ago so i'm loving the fact that all of us are here the european antennas all the japanese antennas even the little baby ones which are my absolute i can't say that yeah i love them they're really great and of course the mighty vertex antennas, which have been holding up ALMA for a while.

So, fantastic. But your first time up here, so it comes off the bucket list. Oh, my gosh, yeah. So I have just loved being at radio telescopes, so working at them. Oh, there they go. Oh, they're moving! Bye! They're on the move. They're on the move. Not that we don't love you, but...

The scopes are, the dishes are slewing. I was reluctant to leave the high site, but no one spends very many hours up there and no one ever spends the night. Back at the operations support facility, I sat down with Avine Vandeshook, a radio astronomer and astrochemist who recently left the ALMA Board of Directors.

That morning, Avine had delivered a great presentation to the hundreds of journalists visiting ALMA. It was your first slide that I was most intrigued by, because you had fine art. That's right. I mean, that's one of my hobbies. I like to search for astronomy and arts and examples of that. Of course, coming from the Netherlands, Svinkerts Z van Gogh is an obvious target, so that one was easy. Starry Night? Starry Night, yes, and there are different versions of the Starry Night, so that's also interesting.

Do you find some kinship with these artists who try and capture the wonder of the universe? Oh, absolutely, absolutely. That's sort of why, indeed, I feel very much connected with that. And because they feel sort of the beauty of the universe, and they feel this urge to paint a universe,

just as much as I feel the urge to do the science. And even beyond that, when you talk about the Aboriginal people in Australia or the Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, they were in their own way trying to figure out what this was all about, which seems to me you're in the same business. Yes, absolutely. They were trying to sort of do cosmology as well and their view of cosmology and their view of order in the universe, so to say. And in one of your slides, you showed a menagerie of simple molecules that we are finding more and more of in space. I mean, water, they don't get much simpler than that. But this is one of the most exciting things

that Alma is going to be able to help us to explore. Oh, yes, certainly for me as a so-called astrochemist, I'm very excited about the chemistry aspects of ALMA. And it's really the combination of the sensitivity of ALMA and also the sharpness with which it can see that it really can zoom in to these regions where new planets are being formed and new stars are being born. And then also it has this incredible spectral resolution that you can really sort of see each of these peaks, see the fingerprints of individual molecules.

So yeah, I mean, it's just, yeah. I'm glad that I now can sort of finally reap the scientific fruits of this 20-year investment. More of my ALMA adventure next week, when we'll hear from the president of Chile, and sort of finally reap the scientific fruits of this 20-year investment. More of my ALMA adventure next week, when we'll hear from the president of Chile, the incoming ALama Desert, you look forward to doing What's Up with Dr. Bruce Betts,

the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Hey, welcome. Welcome back, Matt. Thank you. Welcome to you. Thank you very much. It was an amazing experience, as you could probably tell. And more next week, as I said.

Maybe by then I'll be over this case of Pinochet's revenge. Oh, gosh, I hope so. Yeah. And I really hope we don't hear any more about that. But I hope you feel better. Yes. I also enjoyed your online audio blog. Thank you. I'd hoped to do more of that, but we didn't always have network access, and they just kept us way busy.

But I do point out to people, for the full Matt experience, you can check that out for background on the trip, as well as this week and next week's Planetary Radio. Yes, and lots more stuff posted there. Photos that you can get at, and complete interviews, quite a lot of resources. All right, let's talk night sky. Comet Pan-STARRS, kind of disappointing as comets can be because they're so hard to predict how much dust and gas they're going to put out. But you can still check it out very low in the west shortly after sunset.

Probably going to want to pull out the binoculars, look for a fuzzy blob. You can find finder charts online to make it a little bit easier. But it is there, and will be there for the next week or two. We've also got, of course, Jupiter always super bright these days in the south in the early evening, Saturn rising around 10 or 11 p.m. in the east, and it will be hanging out near the moon on March 28th. If you have a really good view to the low horizon in the east, check out Mercury for the next couple weeks in the pre-dawn, but very, very low. This week in space history, it was a big day, positively

and negatively, in the Soviet space program this week. 1965, Alexei Leonov took the very first spacewalk. In 1980, a Soviet rocket explosion killed 50 workers at a launch pad. Oh, yeah. I remember that. Really, that's quite a horrible tragedy. Moving on to random space facts. Okay. Okay. The prime meridian or zero degrees longitude is, of course, an arbitrary definition.

Where do you define it? It's Greenwich on Earth. The prime meridian of the moon lies directly in the middle of the face of the moon, the average face that's facing the Earth. of the face of the moon, the average face that's facing the Earth. And in fact, this is the same convention used for pretty much all synchronous locked moons in the solar system. You make zero degrees longitude the point that's facing the planet. I also note that the zero degrees longitude point is very near the awesomely named crater Bruce. And that from the

floor, from that crater, the Earth always appears at the zenith right overhead. As it should. A crater named Bruce. So good. Okay, we move on to our trivia contest. The James Webb Space Telescope. The 18 primary mirror segments are made of beryllium, rather exotic, which is light, strong, has good thermal properties. What country and state or province did the

beryllium they used come from? I thought this was particularly obscure trivia. How'd we do? Actually, a lot of people, obscure or not, were able to discover the answer for this one. Our winner, I think it's someone who has been trying for a long time to pick up the win in the trivia contest. It's Cindy Thompson, Cindy Thompson of Salina, Kansas, who said that the beryllium, anyway, came from Utah, right here in the U.S. of A. Cindy, with that, we are going to send you Bill Nye's voice on your answering machine. We got a little bit more detail from some other folks here. I love the name of the area that it came from, where the mines are in Utah, Topaz Spore, the Topaz Spore Mountains.

Mines so often, mine areas, those miners, they always have good names. We got that from Kurt Berndt, who listens to us on his commute on the way to work in Sweden. I want to mention as well a question that you may not be able to answer from Kurt Lewis, who's wondering if they have any spare pieces of beryllium that he would like to make into a telescope at his house. Yeah, I'm not aware of that. You might check with the James Webb project if they have any lying around. You'd think while they're machining it that, you know, it would fall off on the floor and they'd, I have no idea. Shall we move on, Matt? Sure. Back to prime meridians. What surface feature on Venus is taken as defining the prime meridian, in other words, longitude zero degrees? This, by the way, motivated by a Twitter question

related to my class by Skip Morrow. Remember how to tell people to enter? I hope so. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Wow. Twice in a row now. Very nice. I think you've got it. I think he's got it. And you have until the 25th. That would be March 25 at 2 p.m. Pacific time. You can get Bill Nye's voice on your answering system if you are the one chosen and have the right answer. And that's it. Good to talk to you again. Good to talk to you. Welcome back.

And everyone go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about the value of molecular oxygen in large percentages and quantities in the atmosphere. Thank you, and good night. I prefer it canned. Thank you, and good night. I preferred canned. Did you take some canned? Yeah, they gave it to us in cans, little aerosol cans, and trust me, I needed it to get through. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, apparently a close relative of the Dark Lord of the Sith.

He joins us each week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.